Notes to this WWW Version

Alfred J. Drake, Ph. D., has graciously shared his electronic text with readers of the Victorian Web. Please see his linked disclaimer.

Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.

Superscript numbers link to Pater's original notes.

indicates a link to material not in the
original print version. [GPL].

HE Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth
century are more than mere forerunners of the great masters of its
close, and often reach perfection, within the narrow limits which
they chose to impose on their work. Their sculpture shares with
the paintings of Botticelli and the churches of Brunelleschi that
profound expressiveness, that intimate impress of an indwelling
soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the art of Italy in that
century. Their works have been much neglected, and often
almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and
we come with some surprise on the places where their fire still
smoulders. One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who
have given expression to so much power and sweetness. But it is
part of the reserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their
existence, that their histories are for the most part lost, or told but
briefly. From their lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound
and colour has passed away. Mino, the Raphael of sculpture,
Maso del Rodario, whose works add a further grace to [63/64] the
church of Como, Donatello even, — one asks in vain for more than
a shadowy outline of their actual days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more
of a history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed
through his work. I suppose nothing brings the real air of a
Tuscan town so vividly to mind as those pieces of pale blue and
white earthenware, by which he is best known, like fragments of
the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into
the darkened churches. And no work is less imitable: like Tuscan
wine, it loses its savour when moved from its birthplace, from the
crumbling walls where it was first placed. Part of the charm of
this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression, is
common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for
Luca was first of all a worker in marble, and his works in terra
cotta only transfer to a different material the principles of his
sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the
most part in low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies
something of its depression of surface, getting into them by this
means a pathetic suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of
death. They are haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of
strongly-opposed light and shade, and seek their means of
delineation among those last refinements of shadow, which are
almost invisible except in a strong [64/65] light, and which the finest
pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of their work is
expression, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the
ripple of the air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar.

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low
relief? Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school
to which he belongs, have before them the universal problem of
their art; and this system of low relief is the means by which they
meet and overcome the special limitation of sculpture.

That limitation results from the material and other necessary
conditions of all sculptured work, and consists in the tendency of
such work to a hard realism, a one-sided presentment of mere
form, that solid material frame which only motion can relieve, a
thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality of expression
pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hard
presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the
reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles;
each great system of sculpture resisting it in its own way,
etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its stiffness, its heaviness,
and death. The use of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful
contrivance to effect, by borrowing from another art, what the
nobler sculpture effects by strictly appropriate means.

To get not colour, but the equivalent of colour; to secure the
expression and the play of life; to [65/66] expand the too firmly
fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form: — this is
the problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved
in three different ways.

Allgemeinheit — breadth, generality, universality, — is the word
chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many
German critics, to express that law of the most excellent Greek
sculptors, of Pheidias and his pupils, which prompted them
constantly to seek the type in the individual, to abstract and
express only what is structural and permanent, to purge from the
individual all that belongs only to him, all the accidents, the
feelings and actions of the special moment, all that (because in its
own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to look like a
frozen thing if one arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or
essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas: and hence the
breadth of humanity in them, that detachment from the conditions
of a particular place or people, which has carried their influence
far beyond the age which produced them, and insured them
universal acceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and
unspirituality of pure form. But it involved to a certain degree
the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a system of
abstraction which aimed always at the broad and general type, at
the purging away from the [66/67] individual of what belonged only
to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular time and place,
imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor
limits somewhat narrowly defined. When Michelangelo came,
therefore, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle
age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and introspection,
living not a mere outward life like the Greek, but a life full of
intimate experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which
sacrificed so much of what was inward and unseen could not
satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he
was, work which did not bring what was inward to the surface,
which was not concerned with individual expression, with
individual character and feeling, the special history of the special
soul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which
often is, and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for
his work individuality and intensity of expression, while he
avoided a too heavy realism, that tendency to harden into
caricature which the representation of feeling in sculpture is apt
to display. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness
under the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have done with
singular felicity of touch for the Venus of Melos, fraying its
surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit in the thing
seems always on the point of breaking out, as though [67/68] in it
classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the
mystical Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of
ancient work most like that of Michelangelo's own: — this effect
Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a
puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than
realises actual form. Something of the wasting of that snow-
image which he moulded at the command of Piero de' Medici,
when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace,
almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of
all his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness,
suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was
loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that they too
would lose something if the half-realised form ever quite
emerged from the stone, so rough-hewn here, so delicately
finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this
incompleteness. Well! That incompleteness is Michelangelo's
equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealising
pure form, of relieving its stiff realism, and communicating to it
breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a characteristic too
which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of living, his
disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect
finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion
and intensity with [68/69] the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he
gets not vitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems — the system of the Greek
sculptors and the system of Michelangelo — comes the system of
Luca della Robbia and the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth
century, partaking both of the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their
way of extracting certain select elements only of pure form and
sacrificing all the rest, and the studied incompleteness of
Michelangelo, relieving that sense of intensity, passion, energy,
which might otherwise have stiffened into caricature. Like
Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and
individualised expression. Their noblest works are the careful
sepulchral portraits of particular persons — the monument of Conte
Ugo in the Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni,
with the wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north
side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo —
monuments such as abound in the churches of Rome,
inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued Sabbatic joy,
a kind of sacred grace and refinement. And these elements of
tranquillity, of repose, they unite to an intense and individual
expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and subtle
as that of the Greeks, repressing all such curves as indicate solid
form, and throwing the whole into low relief.

[70] The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no
adventure and no excitement except what belongs to the trial of
new artistic processes, the struggle with new artistic difficulties,
the solution of purely artistic problems, fills the first seventy
years of the fifteenth century. After producing many works in
marble for the Duomo and the Campanile of Florence, which
place him among the foremost masters of the sculpture of his age,
he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that
sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisite
and expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery,
to introduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn
and cultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly
characteristic of the Florence of that century, of that in it which
lay below its superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world
modesty and seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet
begun to think that what was good art for churches was not so
good, or less fitted, for their own houses. Luca's new work was
in plain white earthenware at first, a mere rough
imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a
few hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh
success, to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental
pottery, with its strange, bright colours — colours of art, colours
not to be attained in the natural stone — mingled with the tradition
of the old Roman [770/71] pottery of the neighbourhood. The little
red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up in that district from time to
time, are much prized. These colours haunted Luca's fancy. "He
still continued seeking something more," his biographer says of
him; "and instead of making his figures of baked earth simply
white, he added the further invention of giving them colour, to
the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them" — Cosa
singolare, e multo utile per la state! — a curious thing, and very
useful for summer-time, full of coolness and repose for hand and
eye. Luca loved the form of various fruits, and wrought them
into all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them
their natural colours, only subdued a little, a little paler than
nature.

I said that the art of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual
measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the work-
men of his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of
much positive information about their actual history, seems to
bring those work-men themselves very near to us. They bear the
impress of a personal quality, a profound+ expressiveness, what
the French call intimit», by which is meant some subtler sense of
originality — the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and
peculiar in his moods, and manner of apprehension: it is what we
call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree. That
characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still [71/72] in art, rarest of all in
the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is the
quality which alone makes work in the imaginative order really
worth having at all. It is because the works of the artists of the
fifteenth century possess this quality in an unmistakable way that
one is anxious to know all that can be known about them and
explain to one's self the secret of their charm.

1872.

NOTES

+"profund" is here corrected to "profound," the spelling of the
1901 edition.